There was a lot of discussion about this figure back in August when the relevant outage occurred.
From memory, a large percentage of the traffic drop was from other sites breaking as a result of Google not being available. ie, a site completely unrelated to Google, potentially being served by a CDN, that was using Google Analytics on every page could fail to load and/or load/render slower as a result of the specific outage that Google had at the time. This resulted in a traffic drop for far more traffic than just that sourced from Google.
A non-trivial percentage of the Internet is in some way or other dependent on things like Google Analytics/maps/etc, Facebook likes, Twitter recent tweets, etc, such that if any of those services are not available the site fails to load, either correctly or sometimes at all. The same is true in many causes for javascript/etc libraries being loaded from 3rd party sites like Google. Scott On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
Given how much traffic these days is CDN and streaming, is that number really supportable?
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/down-goes-google-down-goes-internet
Cheers, -- jra
-- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274